Indeed. It’s almost like there’s three of them.
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I wonder if they remembered it before he mentioned it. I wasn’t in Palestine. I was in Abu Dhabi, UAE. From friends and family in the United States, I knew the general feeling among American Muslims was a combination of horror and dread. It was both the horror and shock over the events that happened, and fear of a backlash against the community.
There were three main reactions I saw in the Middle East when I was there in the days after 9/11. There was some joy, a sense among some that after decades of American hegemony in the Middle East, there was finally some comeuppance. There was some indifference, especially among my age cohort and social group (I’m excluding the Americans, Canadians, South Africans and Europeans I knew, and restricting it to Arabs). They ranged in age from 13-16 years old. There was almost a sense of unreality to it for a lot of people, one of distance. The third, and biggest reaction I observed was horror, shock, or a sense disgust.
None of this matters however, because even among the joyful, in the Middle East it all largely got washed over with a fourth and very strong reaction in the end: Denial. An incredible number of people in the Middle East think that 9/11 was an inside job. I’d estimate this started happening within weeks. Within about six months, it became a lot more solid before reaching a sort of plateau around 2003. That was when the United States invaded Iraq, and it seemed incredibly obvious to people that prologue was pretext, and there was a real sense that the turn to Iraq away from Afghanistan was either an inexplicable caprice, or part of a long-term plan to reshape the region.
Before 2003, people noticed that certain clerics were disappearing from mosques and the Waqfs (religious trusts) and ministries of religious affairs (there is no separation of mosque and state) were reigning in what clerics could say. There was a real sense of conspiracy, and a sense that extremely important events were transpiring over which people had no control.
The reality of course is that Bin Laden and some of his friends in his super secret fan club got incredibly lucky and exploited a bug in the system that has since been closed easily and quickly. The fact that this was allowed to reshape the world we live in blows my mind to this day, but sometimes that’s all it takes. Just ask the members of the Black Hand or Franz Ferdinand. The governments of the various Arab states realized that they had to reign in the clerics they were sponsoring that had been fomenting outrage over American interference in the Middle East, and giving it a theological basis. For a lot of people, the monumental shifts that disrupted what was a very tenuous sort of stability in the region needed an explanation.
So I’d say that this is the most popular reaction to 9/11 among Muslims and Arabs worldwide. It’s basically, “Someone did it, and it was horrible, but it wasn’t us, and we’ve been suffering for it ever since.” It’s a beautiful myth. It has the benefit of being true in all the right places: Arabs and Muslims didn’t collectively perpetrate 9/11, and the ultimate consequences of 9/11 are the rise of ISIS and less stability in the region overall, and of course, it was horrible. Of course, it really was the product of a virulent strain of Islamic ideology that had been allowed to grow unchecked in a big way, but it wasn’t an inside job. The real inside job took place in people’s minds, and there are two histories of what happened that day. Trump and his supporters are simply building a third. It’s both fascinating and incredibly worrisome.
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The first I heard of “thousands and thousands of people cheering as that building came down” was when Trump mentioned it.
I am the first to admit that human memory is not perfect. We fill in gaps with stuff that wasn’t there, we misread things and invent an alternative version of what happened. But, that said, I morbidly watched a lot of TV news in the week after 9/11, and I never saw anything remotely similar to people in NJ cheering. Not “thousands and thousands” not hundreds, not even a handful. I have friends who live in Hoboken, right next door, and they were in shock, like a shroud had covered the entire NYC area. Nobody was loudly and publicly celebrating within a 100-mile radius.
I DO remember seeing films of cheering crowds in the Middle East (“thousands”? It’s hard to say, maybe hundreds, not stadium-sized crowds), But I also remember a huge candle-light vigil for the victims in Tehran of all places, so it’s not like every Muslim everywhere was pumping their fists and saying “fuck YEAH!” If you think you remember seeing celebrations on the NJ shore then perhaps you are co-mingling different images in your mind. I suppose a Trump supporter can say “well, the liberal media is covering up the footage”-- OK, then why did the “liberal media” show it in the first place back in 2001? And why isn’t Fox News able to find it now?
I will be the first to admit I was wrong if someone comes up with video of thousands cheering in NJ, but that does not correlate to anything I remember seeing 14 years ago, nor with my memory of the mood that enveloped the entire Northeast that day.
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I’m sure you missed my point. Easily done. Come at it from the other direction and realize his character is all we know, and it is disordered.
In no way have I dignosed him under any regime, nor will I be billing his insurer for the coding.
He;s a dick. A bad character. A narcissist.
Why the heck are you derailing with concern trollin about abelsm?
In he laymen sense of the word, I agree he’s a narcissist.
As I said, some commenters (well-intentioned commenters I respect, BTW) up-thread calling for psych-evals to determine his suitability for office. That’s plain abelism in my book. Sorry if that rubs you the wrong way. Perhaps there’s an argument that I shouldn’t have responded to that, but I’m not the one who derailed.
Look, you make a solid point. This isn’t about any of that. Trump’s an Islamophobic shithead. I’m sure we can agree on that. Let’s maybe just leave the diagnoses out of this. I am truly sorry if I contributed to derailing this thread in any way, and I acknowledge that I may have. But I really don’t think this needs to be made about medical conditions. You and I both know that the sort of bigoted conservatives backing him don’ t give a flying fuck about mental health (personality or otherwise). But a lot of Happy Mutants do, and we don’t need to ascribe his bigotry to any medical condition whatsoever.
ETA:
Also, in the my comment to which you replied, I wasn’t referring to you personally. I was referring to certain ablist comments made in this thread by good people other than yourself.
I recall that footage as well, I also recall it turning out that it was old re - 9/11 footage of people in the middle East celebrating something.
He still has all those people dispatched to Hawaii to prove Obama is Kenyan, but they should have that one wrapped up any day now, and then they can switch focus to this.
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I also recollect an airliner crashing in a suburban area a week or so after 9/11 but I can’t find footage of that either. Not that I’m suggesting there is a conspiracy to edit history, it’s just that my memory of both those videos is clear to me even now.
Not trolling.
And regarding Trump, he likes stirring controversy. It gets him attention and people talk about it.
The cure for narcissism is to ignore it.
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Reasonable. I’ve thought about that also.
But, NYC was in the background.
It was in November of 2001. Everyone freaked because it was post 9/11, but it was a structural failure of the aircraft. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_587
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Is this the footage you remember, where they cut from the Middle East to NYC?
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What would it take to convince you that you remembered wrong, and that there never was any news footage of American Muslims celebrating the attacks on 9/11?
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Well, that sets my mind at rest somewhat. Thanks mate.
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“muzzles”
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No. I recollect the towers burning across the river and people celebrating.
beat me to it. WTF?
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You can see Russia from your front porch too, right?
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Auto correct.
St.Andrews day single malt.
I think that American Muslims are, by definition, Americans—and you’d be hard pressed to find any large group of Americans who would openly celebrate an attack on their own country. Certainly it would be a newsworthy event if thousands congregated in the streets to do so, but no one has yet produced news footage of any such thing taking place.
The ones who really hate America and no regard for any of the people in it generally have no interest in living here.
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